FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE:
Contact: Jeff Hauser, [email protected]; Toni Aguilar Rosenthal, [email protected]
In response to President Trump’s lawless actions, Executive Director of The Revolving Door Project, Jeff Hauser and Senior Researcher Toni Aguilar Rosenthal released the following statement:
“Independent agencies, and their crucial staff, have protected the public from abusive and illegal conduct in every industry from banking and telecoms to union busting, monopolists, retail price gougers, and more. They have been able to fulfill these unique and crucial mandates assigned to them by Congress precisely because of their independence from the office of the President. Without this protection it is unlikely that regulators of complex issues and industries would continue to act out of specific expertise in defense of the public interest. Now these important consumer protections will likely fall prey to political whims.” said Aguilar Rosenthal.
Hauser added: “Yesterday, Donald Trump sought to illegally abolish, co-opt, control, and consolidate the independent powers and authorities of congressionally-designated independent agencies within his own office. The move is a brazen rejection of many decades of existing federal law, and fundamentally seeks to rewrite the separation of powers while eroding the ability of the federal government to serve as a corporate watchdog.”
“Trump is stripping powers from experts at independent agencies and entrusting it instead to the review of Trump’s head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Russell Vought. Vought is, notoriously, a Christian Nationalist, longtime advocate for the functional project of presidential authoritarianism, architect of Project 2025, an advocate for deploying the U.S. military against domestic citizens, and more.” Hauser continued.
“Vought is an unelected, unqualified, and unfit political operative with no specific understanding of regulated entities, and he has no business dictating the broad affairs of the enormity of our regulatory infrastructure. His newfound power over independent agencies renders crucial government infrastructure little more than a hollow political bludgeon. Indeed, Trump has no mandate for actualizing Project 2025, or empowering its architects, given that he repeatedly and explicitly disavowed it and accused the media of lying whenever they sought to hold him accountable for his association with it.” concluded Hauser.
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